Re: Discussion about why GNU/Linux system upgrades cause old programs to break

Arsen Arsenović <[email protected]> Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:12:29 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.emacs.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]> writes:

> Please consider the plight of the person who bumps into these problems
> and needs to solve them so the program (which built and worked for
> ages) will build again.  At the very least, they need to:
>
>   . realize such an option exists
>     - indexing of the manual is not a great help here: there are no
>       index entries in the Concept Index leading directly to it; a
>       few entries that mention some of the relevant warnings do lead
>       to the "Warning Options" node, but the node is very long
>   . read and understand the description of each of the -Wfoo warnings
>     it disables and decide whether it's applicable and if so, whether
>     it's desirable to disable it
>   . preferably understand the significance of C Standard versions to
>     which the manual alludes, and their relation to the program's code
>
> This requires non-trivial knowledge of the C Standard and related
> subjects, and also non-trivial amount of tenacity, let alone time and
> effort.
>
> If this is not evidence how poorly we treat users in such situations,
> I don't know what is.

As I've said elsewhere, I think that this particular change has helped
many orders of magnitude more users than it has harmed.

I do not object to the idea that -fpermissive might need to get featured
more prominently in the documentation.  That may well be true.

It may even be useful to emit a hint about it as I've stated elsewhere.

But, as I've also stated elsewhere, I highly doubt that knowing about
-fpermissive would've actually saved many here.
-- 
Arsen Arsenović

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